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BlackLight Power, Inc. Announces Independent Validation of Breakthrough New Energy Source Based on a New Form of Hydrogen and Chemistry Capable of Continuous Regeneration Cranbury, NJ (August 12, 2009)—BlackLight Power, Inc. (BLP) today announces that scientists at Rowan University have for the first time independently formulated and tested fuels that on demand generated energy greater than that of combustion at power levels of kilowatts using BLP’s proprietary solid-fuel chemistry capable of continuous regeneration. Operating power systems using BLP’s chemistry, Rowan University professors have reported a net energy gain of up to 6.5 times the maximum energy potential of the materials...

IT IS the ultimate cosmic villain: space and time come to an abrupt end in its presence and the laws of physics break down. Now it seems a "naked" black hole may yet emerge in our universe, after spinning away its event horizon.

Are cosmic rays revealing the quantum nature of spacetime? Could theories of (not) everything help solve the puzzle of quantum gravity? The architect of doubly special relativity thinks so.In his youth, there were two things that regularly competed for Giovanni Amelino-Camelia’s attention: his favorite soccer team, Napoli, and "anything that came close to being scientific." And since Napoli was struggling in the Italian soccer league in the summer of 1978, Amelino-Camelia found himself watching a series of programs on special relativity instead of soccer. "That was really the point of no return for me," he remembers. "Although I was 13-years...

WASHINGTON -- Imagine a carbon sheet that's only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips. That's graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It is creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers. "It is the thinnest known material in the universe and the strongest ever measured," Andre Geim, a physicist at the University of Manchester, England, wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science. "A few grams could cover a football field," Rod Ruoff, a graphene researcher...

This message, made up of tiny crystals suspended in a gel, was created using a series of laser pulses scanned through a template.A. Alexander / U. Edinburgh A technique that creates crystals on demand using laser pulses could make it easier to prepare the high-quality crystals needed to study protein structure.Chemists and biologists need crystals of proteins and other chemicals to analyse their atomic structure using X-rays, while many industrial processes rely on triggering crystal formation at precisely the right time and place during the production of drugs and other useful compounds.Yet "crystallization still remains largely a black art," says...

The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections. Many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies. Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine across the ocean. After 15 years and $9 billion, and a showy “switch-on” ceremony last September, the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, has to yet collide any particles at all. But soon? This week, scientists and engineers...

Scientists claim to have created a form of aluminum that's nearly transparent to extreme ultraviolet radiation and which is a new state of matter. It's an idea straight out of science fiction, featured in the movie "Star Trek IV." Fusion is a dream of scientists who would create cheap and plentiful power by fusing atoms together, as opposed to nuclear fission that generates electricity today.

Armchair astronomers have helped discover a batch of tiny galaxies that may help professional astronomers understand how galaxies formed stars in the early universe. Dubbed the "Green Peas," the galaxies are forming stars 10 times faster then the Milky Way despite being 10 times smaller and 100 times less massive. They are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away "These are among the most extremely active star-forming galaxies we've ever found," said Carolin Cardamone, lead author of a paper on the discoveries to be published in an upcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminium’ previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion. In the journal Nature Physics an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly...

Gamma-ray spike in Fermi telescope data hikes anticipation.The jury is still out on whether Fermi has spied dark matter.NASA/DOE/International LAT Team The murky hunt for dark matter has just got a little bit brighter. New gamma-ray results from the FERMI telescope fit with previous tantalizing hints of a detection of the mysterious stuff.Last year, a series of independent experiments caused a stir because they seemed to have detected signals of dark matter, which is believed to make up 85% of the universe's matter."There's been tremendous excitement about cosmic ray signals that have dark matter as one possible explanation," says Neal...

Hideo Hosono's research group at the Tokyo Institute of Technology was not looking for a superconductor in 2006. Rather the team was trying to create new kinds of transparent semiconductors for flat-panel displays. But when the researchers characterized the electronic properties of their new substance -- a combination of lanthanum, oxygen, iron and phosphorus -- they found that below four kelvins, or -269 degrees Celsius, it lost all resistance to carrying an electric current; that is, it superconducted. Although 4 K is far below the current laboratory record of 138 K (let alone the holy grail of "room temperature," or...

Baroque field gets fresh lease of life in condensed-matter physics. String theory - more than just a 'theory of everything'?Alamy Until recently, string theory — long heralded as a 'theory of everything' — hadn't been particularly good at explaining anything.But at a workshop this month at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, scientists have been using the theory to make progress in tackling one of the biggest puzzles in condensed-matter physics: the origin of high-temperature superconductivity. String theory suggests that vibrating strings that exist in 10 dimensions underpin the observable Universe. Although that basic premise is still...

To a physicist, life seems little short of miraculous — all those stupid atoms getting together to perform such clever tricks! For centuries, living organisms were regarded as some sort of magic matter. Today, we know that no special “life force” is at work in biology; there is just ordinary matter doing extraordinary things, all the while obeying the familiar laws of physics. What, then, is the secret of life’s remarkable properties? In the late 1940s and 1950s it was fashionable to suppose that quantum mechanics — or perhaps some soon-to-be-formulated “post-quantum mechanics” — held the key to the mystery...

Today we present a very special installment of the Codex Futurius, Science Not Fiction’s look at the big scientific ideas in sci-fi: Kevin Grazier—JPL physicist and friend of SNF—gives an insider’s peek at the workings of and discussion around the Orion antimatter drive used to propel the Phaeton starship in Ron D. Moore’s recent TV movie, Virtuality. Grazier was a science adviser for the movie (which was intended to be the pilot for an ongoing show), so he was right in the middle of these discussions. The screenshot further down in this post shows the actual spreadsheet used in the...

As modern cosmologists rely more and more on the ominous “dark matter” to explain otherwise inexplicable observations, much effort has gone into the detection of this mysterious substance in the last two decades, yet no direct proof could be found that it actually exists. Even if it does exist, dark matter would be unable to reconcile all the current discrepancies between actual measurements and predictions based on theoretical models. Hence the number of physicists questioning the existence of dark matter has been increasing for some time now. Competing theories of gravitation have already been developed which are independent of this...

Three educators give their views on exams Susan Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution "Back when I went to Oxford, the entrance exams for women were different. The one for Oxford I found most challenging was the general classics paper. It was a 3.5 hour paper – you had half an hour to think ,then one hour for each question. I still remember one of the questions – 'compare the ideas of empire in Greece and Rome'. That was a real high jump intellectually. Exams are good things. They prepare you...

Astronomers have turned up the oldest and most distant supernova ever found: the star that created it detonated just 3 billion years after the big bang. The technique used to find it could reveal tens of thousands of other ancient supernovae, tracing out how the universe became seeded over time with heavy elements. Because light travels at a finite speed, more distant supernovae also occur further back in time. The calculated distance of the newly discovered blast suggests it occurred 10.7 billion years ago – about 1.5 billion years earlier than the previous record holder. The new blast was a...

The orbit of the innermost planet, Mercury, departs from what it should be under Newton's laws. A century ago, when Einstein explained this anomaly, it confirmed his theory of gravity - the general theory of relativity. Now an Israeli physicist predicts that a similar but far more subtle anomaly in the orbits of the planets, if detected, might prove his own theory, known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND. This provides an alternative theory to dark matter to explain why stars orbiting at the edge of spiral galaxies are not flung out into space. These stars are travelling at speeds...

Did dark matter destroy the universe? You might be looking around at the way things "exist" and thinking "No", but we're talking about ancient history. Three hundred million years after the start of the universe, things had finally cooled down enough to form hydrogen atoms out of all the protons and electrons that were zipping around - only to have them all ripped up again around the one billion year mark. Why? Most believe that the first quasars, active galaxies whose central black holes are the cosmic-ray equivalent of a firehose, provided the breakup energy, but some Fermilab scientists have...

If the universe obeyed Newton's laws of gravity, there would be about a 60% chance that Mercury would head toward the Sun or Venus during the Sun’s lifetime. But according to a new study, corrections to Newton's laws using Einstein's theory of gravity (general relativity) lower these chances to about 1%. That’s good news, because if Mercury had a near miss with Venus or the Sun, it could wreak havoc on Earth.